Thursday, July 6, 2017

Staunton, July 6 – Muslims from
Russia’s Middle Volga region who went to fight for the DNR and LNR in Ukraine
were motivated by their sense of belonging to the Russian world Vladimir Putin
has talked so much about, according to Rais Suleymanov, editor of Musulmanskymir and someone long rumored to be close to Russia’s security
agencies.

But in a preservation to the 12th
Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia in Izhevsk this week,
the often controversial specialist on Islam in Russia says that those Muslims
who went defined the concept of “’the Russian world’” in two very different
ways (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/07/05/chto_est_russkij_mir/).

“For one group of
Muslim volunteers,” Suleymanov says, “the ideology of ‘the Russian world’ was
conceived as a return to a model of the Soviet Union,, to be sure in a renewed
format (the conception of ‘USSR 2.0’) and the war in the Donbass was seen as a
struggle with fascism.”Thus, these
Muslim volunteers had “Soviet ideological convictions.”

According to the speaker, “the
second group of Muslim volunteers from the Middle Volga view ‘the Russian world’
as the reunification with Russia of territories populated by ethnic Rusisans,
the ideal for whom is the Russian Empire, and the battle in the Donbass is seen
as a Russian irredenta.”

Suleymanov says that “for the majority
of Muslim volunteers from the Middle Volga is characteristic a double ethnic
identity: while not denying their Tatar or Bashkir origin, they consider
themselves [ethnic] Russians and such self-identification peacefully exists in
their consciousness.”

Many of those who did choose to
volunteer, however, chose to do so in order to escape from their everyday life
and to change it, something that affected their own “self-assessment and gave
rise to a sense of serving a noble goal and being useful,” he argues.

Intriguingly, Suleymanov says that “Muslim
volunteers from the Middle Volga have not always remained Muslims. Some of them
decide that their Russianness means they must become Orthodox or neo-paganist.
Which of these they actually chose, he says, depended on what the Russian
volunteers around them practiced.

The reason that they could change
their religious affiliation, he argues, is “their own weak Muslim religiosity,
the influence of their military comrades, and the emotional boost from
participating in ‘the Russian spring.’”Nonetheless, Suleymanov acknowledges, many Tatar volunteers have
remained Muslim.

Some of them, he says, inscribed
their weapons with the words “Allah is With US!”“In their understanding,” he argues, “the
Muslims of Russia, fighting for Novorossiya are fighting for the interests of
Russia where traditional Islam is triumphing over anti-Russian directions of
radical tendencies of foreign Islam.”

Suleymanov’s argument is one that
many in Moscow security community would find congenial, but the sample size for
his conclusions was very small. Some Tatars and Bashkirs did in fact go to the
Donbass to fight for Moscow’s agenda, but their number was too small to make sweeping
conclusion about the attitudes of Muslims, Tatars, or anyone else.